Many different personal care products exist in the marketplace. Such personal care products include shampoos, conditioners, cosmetic products, hand moisturizers, body creams, shower gels and other detergents, and the like. Most of these products are for application to a certain area of the body. To be marketable, these products must meet certain stringent requirements in addition to being well suited for their intended use. For instance, many of these products must have a pleasing fragrance or no fragrance, must have a uniform consistency, and must apply evenly to a surface with a controlled viscosity. Typically, thicker personal care products are described as luxurious and therefore are more desired.
Many personal care products comprise emulsions. The products contain emulsifiers to stabilize the emulsion droplets, thickeners to add body, emollients to seal in moisture, and humectants to bind water. To improve the thickness and increase the viscosity of an emulsion system, fatty alcohols are typically added to the products at a level sufficient to yield an emulsion with good body. Problems, however, are experienced in increasing the body or viscosity of the emulsion to desired levels without having deleterious effects on the overall product.
For instance, in order to build the viscosity of an emulsion system, increased levels of a fatty alcohol or increased levels of various polymers may be added to the emulsion. Adding higher levels of these components, however, not only leads to significantly higher costs of the goods, but such increased levels may adversely impact on the aesthetics of the formula. For instance, addition of polyacrylates will build emulsion viscosity but may lead to increased tackiness of the emulsion. In other embodiments, increased thickeners may adversely affect the color of the product and/or adversely affect the smell of the product.
In view of the above, those skilled in the art have attempted to develop better thickeners or viscosity building compositions that can be added in minimal amounts for increasing the viscosity of the products to desired levels. In this regard, the present disclosure is directed to improved viscosity building compositions.